Posted
by
kdawson
on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @07:02PM
from the back-from-the-shredders dept.

ctmurray writes "Computer technicians have found 22 million missing White House e-mails from the administration of President George W. Bush, and the Obama administration is searching for dozens more days' worth of potentially lost e-mail from the Bush years, according to two groups that had filed a lawsuit — which has now been dropped — over the failure by the Bush White House to install an electronic record-keeping system. Earlier we discussed the Obama White House's opposition to the lawsuit that led to this discovery." The related links reflect our discussions about the missing emails over two years.

Are we to understand that it was the people in Bush's white house that failed, and not "the gubbermint"? Nonsense and tosh! If people are the root cause of government's failures then the party of "government sucks" has some mirror-gazing to do.

Oh I wouldn't be so quick to defend the democrats either. Most of congress was right there with Bush on a number of controversial issues up to and including when the democrats had control. Both parties are guilty as frak and you'd have to be extraordinarily naive to believe that that kind of corruption and failure will be limited to Bush and friends.

The government is made up of people in a very high position of power. There's no reason to believe that they're any less corruptible than anyone else. The abuses of power continue despite Bush's administration being replaced. The government as a whole did fail. It wasn't something that was solely Bush's doing; it was and continues to be systemic.

Sure, but that applies just as well to rapists, murderers, and investment bankers.

So what? In case you haven't noticed, the government bashers have a ready solution for this problem. Cut the size of government and its power and you cut the opportunity for mischief and mayhem. It doesn't matter if government is made of ordinary people or people who have a magic susceptibility to corruption. The solution works in both cases.

Rather than debate some dubious position not held by most people and irrelevant even in the cases where it is believed, in other words a strawman argument, how about

Cut the size of government and its power and you cut the opportunity for mischief and mayhem.

If only it were that simple. If the functions that a particular government organization is performing are cut and then are merely transferred to private enterprise, then the opportunity for mischief and mayhem remain, at best, the same. In addition, private enterprise is by many metrics less transparent, less accountable, and more profit driven than government. If that function was for the public good, then going private enterprise means less accountability and more mischief and mayhem... but at least with less transparency, you and I might know less about it.

I am not advocating bigger government or smaller government. In the end, there are no easy solutions which makes public policy and the business of government very boring and unsuited to 30 second soundbites. Our system is still very flawed and the way our politicians play the game these days just makes it worse. But of course, it is the people that lets this happen and the people in the end have to decide as collective to fix it.

Are we to understand that it was the people in Bush's white house that failed, and not "the gubbermint"? Nonsense and tosh!

Clinton's Administration didn't seem to have a problem with archiving e-mails.I imagine that if Obama's Administration was having problems, we'd know about it by now.So with that in mind, I'm going to go ahead and say that yes, it was the people in Bush's white house that failed.

From: Dick Cheney
We need to destroy freedom to save it. I want to track everything. I want to track every keystroke on every computer ever. We will all feel safer when ther eis no safety from our snooping.

From: George W. Bush
I think my mind is a terrible fool thing again, hey what was that song by the Who?

From: ATT
Dear Mr President - it is all set up. Just pick up your phone reciever and press STAR 6 6 6. This will allow you to instantly listen to conversations by REAL LIVE TERRORISTS. It might SOUND like someone ordering pizza, but really, THEY ARE ORDERING OUR DESTRUCTION! Ask Cheney - he'll tell ya.

"The liberal groups CREW and National Security Archive litigate for sport, distort the facts and have consistently tried to create a spooky conspiracy out of standard IT issues"
- Former Bush White House spokesman Scott Stanzel

Yeah, those stupid liberal groups are just out to hodgepodge the truth again. All we did was violate 2 federal laws by not keeping records of our communications, and had insanely incompetent I.T. staff at this, the richest and most powerful country in the world. What a bunch of baloney. Just an honest mistake. Tens of millions of e-mails, big whoop. Wanna fight about it?

It's not beyond belief that the e-mails were mislabeled when they were archived. That kind of thing happens often enough in more than one business....civil service being what it is I think it highly likely it actually happened the way they say. If Bush and company really wanted the e-mails gone I doubt they would have ever turned up again. It's far too easy to dispose of data...hell....it's difficult to keep it.

Yeah, those stupid liberal groups are just out to hodgepodge the truth again. All we did was violate 2 federal laws by not keeping records of our communications, and had insanely incompetent I.T. staff at this, the richest and most powerful country in the world. What a bunch of baloney. Just an honest mistake. Tens of millions of e-mails, big whoop. Wanna fight about it?

If this wasn't purely about politics, where were their fucking lawsuits when the Clinton-Gore administration lost emails?

At least according to their Wikipedia page [wikipedia.org], they were founded in 2003.

I certainly hope they don't just fold because another party is in charge now. It seems like they've done good work so far, hopefully they'll watch the Obama administration as they did the Bush administration.

I'm sorry but I cannot believe that some people on Slashdot still think Pres. Bush is responsible for our country's economic problems. His fiscal policies did not help (unless you are a Keynesian economist; in that case him starting two wars and increasing government spending {technically Congress started the wars and increased the spending, but we'll ignore that fact like many liberals conveniently do} actually helped the economy) but our economic problems were not caused by Pres. Bush any more than they w

Do you assume it's one person? What if it was 10 people? What if it was 100? What if it was 1000?

If you work a 40-hour work week, there are 2080 hours per year when you work. Over 8 years, one person working a full-time job with no overtime works 16,640 hours. If you've got 100 people working full-time for 8 years, that equates to 13 emails per hour per person. Now imagine if they work 60 hour weeks, or 80 hour weeks. 5-10 emails per hour doesn't seem all that outlandish when you're helping run a cou

Don't forget CC emails probably count as multiples. So say one person sends an email and CCs 9 others, that 10 emails in total. Then you possibly need to include the Sent folder, so add another email on top of that. Making 11 emails in total for just one sent email in this situation.

Just think of how many people would be considered to be part of the Bush administration and multiply that by the number of emails per day and any duplicates and it becomes fairly easy to see how this many emails could be sent.

I'd guess incoming email also counts, so that figure even looks low to me when I personally might be getting half a million spam messages per day. I guess at least they did have some spam filter or the number would be much higher.

It's hard to believe that the former Bush Administration edited 22 million emails.

That would mean at least 7,500 emails per day including weekends and holidays; and at least 5 emails per minute.

Now, just tell me who in Bush's administration was spewing such an amount of email.

There are approx. 1,700 White House staff. This is not counting OEOB staff that works across the street or other Executive branch personnel that most likely would have there email grouped with the White House archives.

If I had mod points, I'd mod you up.
I remember reading something about a Bush official talking about how terrible and obsolete the old Lotus system was and how they had modernized the system by going Outlook and Exchange. (ouch)
On the other hand, it's not hard to imagine that these particular "mislabeled" emails were lost for other reasons, inadvertant or otherwise.

Why doesn't the government try and make some money off of this? I mean, they could sell all the White House emails to Google -- $1/email -- and then google could set up a search engine for them. Something like, whitehouseemails.google.com [google.com], and we can search through them? Of course, they'd have to go through a security screen first, but still, I bet all the pundits on the right AND the left would go nuts over having access to something like this? =)

The tapes were all turned over to the National Archives, the existence of them has been known for over two years. It was just a matter of sorting through the sixty thousand or so to find the backups mentioned in the article. It doesn't appear any attempt was ever made to hide or destroy anything, just sloppy record-keeping.
Will be interesting to see if anything significant is found, but I predict the conspiracy theorists are going to be very disappointed.

I agree that people like that live in a troubling tautology. But there's another thing at work here, and probably the most important and successful conspiracy working today - and that is the conspiracy to discredit conspiracy theorists. The popular opinion today is that conspiracy theorists are nutters, and that's a real boon to anyone involved in a conspiracy. If they're being investigated, there's already a prejudice to dismiss the investigator as crazy. How wonderfully useful.

"...two groups that had filed a lawsuit — which has now been dropped — over the failure by the Bush White House to install an electronic record-keeping system.

what exactly is the fucking point over a lawsuit to prove that one of the most secretive components of our Government actually saved data that is very well likely to be CLASSIFIED to begin with? Did these groups or the lawyers actually think they were going to be allowed to see the "hard evidence" of this? Give me a fucking break.

Regardless of how you may feel about Bush and the job that Administration did, this is an utterly pointless lawsuit that reeks of bashing one(of many) "rough" Administrations. N

what exactly is the fucking point over a lawsuit to prove that one of the most secretive components of our Government actually saved data that is very well likely to be CLASSIFIED to begin with? Did these groups or the lawyers actually think they were going to be allowed to see the "hard evidence" of this? Give me a fucking break.

Your post, sir/ma'am, is full of fail.

If we were talking about e-mails on a classified network, then the data would be gone. The process for cleaning a hard drive of classified information is to randomly overwrite the HDD with random bits no fewer than five times... and then degauss the son of a bitch.

Now, if we were talking about classified information on an unclassified system, that's practically a cyber-oil spill, and I imagine the press would have been all over it.

what exactly is the fucking point over a lawsuit to prove that one of the most secretive components of our Government actually saved data that is very well likely to be CLASSIFIED to begin with? Did these groups or the lawyers actually think they were going to be allowed to see the "hard evidence" of this? Give me a fucking break.

Your post, sir/ma'am, is full of fail.

If we were talking about e-mails on a classified network, then the data would be gone. The process for cleaning a hard drive of classified information is to randomly overwrite the HDD with random bits no fewer than five times... and then degauss the son of a bitch.

Now, if we were talking about classified information on an unclassified system, that's practically a cyber-oil spill, and I imagine the press would have been all over it.

So, no. We're talking about information that's maybe For Official Use Only or Law Enforcement Sensitive. And the more of it the American public gets to see, the better.

Actually, the latest procedures do not allow for formatting and degaussing anymore, it must be destroyed. Furthermore, I was also referring to FOUO classified levels as well, which it is very well likely that we will not be privy to for another couple of decades, which by then, another 2 or 3 Administrations from now will make the Bush era look golden by comparison...IF our economy and the dollar last that long.

I knew this was coming when I first heard about the White House scrapping their previous GroupWise based email archiving system, as they were switching to Exchange, and deciding to roll their own archiving system.Thanks to Sarbanes-Oxley, email archiving is big business now and you can buy enterprise ready solution from the likes of EMC.Instead they decided to have a private contractor roll a custom system, spent a couple hundred million and 2 years, and then scrapped it for not working right (scrapped by the White House CIO).In the end they implemented an EMC solution, right before Bush left office.They can pull the wool over non technical peoples eyes, but I have no doubt they purposely FUBAR'ed this, there was no reason not to go with an industry standard solution from the get go unless they were up to no good.Supporting facts: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20080417/chron.htm [gwu.edu]

They can pull the wool over non technical peoples eyes, but I have no doubt they purposely FUBAR'ed this, there was no reason not to go with an industry standard solution from the get go unless they were up to no good.

You ever worked with a government contractor, or even a huge corporation?

I'm sure the OTS solution was unacceptable because it wasn't using legacy 3.5" single sided floppies formatted for 937.73K each running on a CP/M terminal accessible by thirteen different departments in nine different ways each by thirty-five untrained secretaries with a five second response time that of course would never be used by any of them. And also the servers had to be the proper shade of green.

Actually, with some of the data retention rules caused by SOX, etc. I have often wondered how much storing the volume of spam that must be received by a corporate mailserver is costing the economy. Unless there is some loophole that allows "spam" that is presumedly filterend and never delivered to not be archived.

I seriously would not be surprised if the vast majority of these emails were stuff like "hey, wanna go to arby's/mcdonalds/taco bell for lunch", "incre4se y0ur manh00d", or "Dear sir, I am the prime minister of Nigeria".

Including them does allow inflating the numbers though, 22 million missing emails sounds ominous.

We also know that the Bush administration purposefully pushed conversations out to private email accounts to hide what they were up to. We have email messages where correspondents say to take conversations off the record.

If it really was a coverup, then they would have been deleted completely.

If I can reformat a drive to DoD 5225-22 M and find someone to destructively dispose of a disk, you don't think the USAF folks in charge of White House communications can if they were ordered too? Same goes for civilians working at the White House. If the Bush administration really wanted emails to "get lost", they would have.

No, because the Bush/Cheney administration are incredibly talented at pulling one of the biggest conspiracies in the history of the US while being inept, ignorant, uneducated, stupid, and a horrible public speaker. In other words, one of the smartest stupid educated ignorant uneducated charismatic foot-in-mouther guys in the world was just POTUS and deceived the entire world while completely ruining - in secret, mind you - the US economy.

And for the next X years, anything that goes wrong with foreign diplomacy, military conflicts, or the US economy is Bush's fault that Obama (or whoever else) is "cleaning up" with "tried and proven methods" of some sort (that apparently we have known about since the 30s but I guess nobody wants to try them; that or they've been tried and failed but we don't want to admit it).

> No, because the Bush/Cheney administration are incredibly talented at> pulling one of the biggest conspiracies in the history of the US while> being inept, ignorant, uneducated, stupid, and a horrible public speaker.

Bush may or may not have been inept; on that we will actually will have to wait for the verdict of history. Cheney was however one of the most stunningly successful senior executives in US history, getting more of his agenda accomplished than any other President except FDR and possibly more than him as well (so much is still classified so we don't and may never know). To call Cheney "stupid" or "inept" is, well, foolish.

And if it is impossible for a large group to keep a secret in Washington DC, answer me this: besides Libby, Addington, and Yoo, who were the other 37 members of Cheney's staff from 2001-2009? Oh wait, their names, salaries, titles, and duties were kept secret for 8 years, Cheney used his self-granted power to classify the information secret, and it never leaked. Nor did the members or agenda of Cheney's 2001 oil conference ever leak. Again, after the events of 2002-2006 to say it is not possible to manage a secret concerted effort in DC is foolish.

Bush may or may not have been inept; on that we will actually will have to wait for the verdict of history.

Then you aren't the type of person/attitude I was sarcastically aiming at:)

To call Cheney "stupid" or "inept" is, well, foolish.

I agree.

And if it is impossible for a large group to keep a secret in Washington DC, answer me this:

It's certainly not impossible; and while investigating is fine and I don't have a problem with that, many seem to run rampant with conspiracy theories based on nothing more than the fact that they don't know (even though with some of them, we probably do know, but it doesn't suit their particular political bent - whether R. or D.).

I was primarily venting because I get tired of - and not you, apparently - various people attacking Bush (or Obama, for that matter) as being both exceedingly cunning/educated/knowledgeable-about-everything-going-on and stupid/ignorant/high-school-dropout. Slightly exaggerated, depending on who you talk to. "My" side - since conservatives tend to be Republicans - do it with Obama, too. Obama is well on his way, apparently, to turn the US into a Muslim country, to completely ruin the country economically and to ruin health care, all the while being ignorant, inept, and completely inexperienced.

I actually disagree very strongly with Obama on many issues... unfortunately, when many people disagree, they get angry; and when angry, they apparently don't think rationally and start accusing of even contradictory things....

>> Bush may or may not have been inept; on that we will actually>> will have to wait for the verdict of history.

> Then you aren't the type of person/attitude I was sarcastically aiming at:)

I suspect I will have to disappoint you then: personally I think the verdict on the outcomes of W Bush's/policies and actions/ is already in, and those outcomes were, are, and will be for the (now shortened) lifespan of the United States colossally bad. However, whether Bush was inept or was actually v

Everyone does the best he can. Why do we consider politicians to be some sort of know-it-all superheroes? They don't have the easy answers to the complicated problems either. If they did, a lot more people would because, guess what, they're not the smartest, best informed people on the planet.

A politician, at least a successful one, is usually good at one thing: Being a politician. Getting elected. That does not necessarily entail being a cunning businessman, an experienced expert for social problems, a per

We don't expect super0human qualities. We expect them to do their jobs without being corrupted or serving their own interests or those of their associates. We expect them to represent our interests as they promised to do in their campaigns. We expect them to uphold the constitution as they swore in their oath of office.

Yeah, I'm afraid that any doubt about what kind of president he was kinda left the building when he called the constitution a just a Goddamned piece of paper [prisonplanet.com], at least it did for me,YMMV.

I was stunned by your quotation of Bush. I had never heard anything like that before and agree that such a statement coming from a sitting President (or even a former President) would be very disturbing.
I followed the link, read the article, and noticed that the author did not cite ANY sources of this comment. I noticed he also attached outrageous statements to other administration officials, also without citing any references. I searched the internet could not find any other sources for any of the author's claims, other than repetition of the same article you linked to.
I must conclude that the writer of that article is not telling the truth and you have been duped. If there had been any truth to this kind of statement, other media would have latched onto this. I am not saying there aren't numerous other reasons to despise Bush, it simply appears that this one didn't actually happen.

We don't expect super0human qualities. We expect them to do their jobs without being corrupted or serving their own interests or those of their associates. We expect them to represent our interests as they promised to do in their campaigns. We expect them to uphold the constitution as they swore in their oath of office.

Obama is well on his way, apparently, to turn the US into a Muslim country

WTF?

completely ruin the country economically

Was done before he got there.

ruin health care

Was done before Nixon got there, and the reforms Nixon was trying to push were a lot more involved than what Obama is trying to get through. It really should be a bipartisan issue instead of being blocked by wreckers that don't want to see Obama succeed at anything even if it is in the national interest.

Re-reading, though, I still think there's a problem; if Cheney was so good at keeping these things a secret, you'd think his secret-keeping IT staff would have deleted the e-mails from backups, too, as WyattEarp said.

Even I would have done that if I were trying to cover up something that badly.

Re-reading, though, I still think there's a problem; if Cheney was so good at keeping these things a secret, you'd think his secret-keeping IT staff would have deleted the e-mails from backups, too, as WyattEarp said.

Even I would have done that if I were trying to cover up something that badly.

Something, at least, seems fishy there.

I'll contribute to the conspiracy theories!

Perhaps 18 months was how long they needed to sort through 22 million emails and remove any traces of illegal activity. Now that the emails have been sanitized, they have been miraculously "found".

Or, perhaps the provided reason for discovery points to why these email were not deleted... they were mislabeled as backups for a different system and thus never destroyed by the Cheney-ites. We may be days away from announcements of indictments against the Bush Ad

Well, it's been 3-4 years. That's plenty of time to go through all the GBs of backups, find the incriminating stuff, edit it out, and re-package the rest so that your hands look clean. Not that I think that's what happened, but if I were carrying things out for an evil conspiracy, that's about how I would do it: "Lose things" to buy time while I sweep away the guilty fingerprints.

No, because the Bush/Cheney administration are incredibly talented at pulling one of the biggest conspiracies in the history of the US while being inept, ignorant, uneducated, stupid, and a horrible public speaker. In other words, one of the smartest stupid educated ignorant uneducated charismatic foot-in-mouther guys in the world was just POTUS and deceived the entire world while completely ruining - in secret, mind you - the US economy.

Uh, yeah. Bush and Cheney were secretly planning to ruin the economy because.... well just because they are evil.

As for who ruined the economy, and whose holding it down, if you will take the time to read the Constitution, you will learn that it is not the executive branch at all that controls the economy, but the legislative branch. So blaming Bush/Cheney or Obama/Biden really just shows ignorance. Congress controls the purse strings. I don't know if you old enough to remember, but just a few years ago

"'Bush's tax cuts to the rich' (I got a tax cut. I had no idea that 50k/yr made you rich!)"

I think you're being disingenuous. The point being made is that although the Bush tax cuts affected every bracket, the brackets they favored most were the highest ones.

"Then the economy tanked. What changed? Here's another hint, it rhymes with congress."

I'm sorry, but if you think that the Democrats in Congress did anything to affect the economy this badly in the space of only one year in office, I don't think you paid the slightest bit of attention to the legislation passed in 2007. You could cite legislation they passed in 2008 for making it WORSE, or reform they blocked while in the minority before 2007, but there's nothing to even correlate with the downfall of the economy for that year except for raising the minimum wage.

Secondly, in the year 2001, Republicans had a majority until June 6 when Jim Jeffords switched in June, and a 10 to 12 member majority in the House of Representatives. Using your own logic, then, the same party as the President must have been responsible.

In truth, what you describe is the official description of the president's role, but if you took a political science class, you would know the president has considerable influence over Congress. The President has used Rahm Emanuel and Joe Biden effectively to mediate disputes between members of Congress and make sure that the interests of members in favor of a bill are aligned, such that less disputes arise between one faction fighting for something in a bill another faction wants out.

Actually, the problems today began back in the 80's when the first wave of banking deregulation happened under Reagan. That eventually lead to the S&L scandal. However, that didn't keep deregulation from happening. The late 90's was the next big flub. After World War Web happened, interest rates were dropped through the floor. The deregulation removed leverage limits and all those other pesky regulations that prevented banks from acting like drunken sailors. Then the whole thing fell apart when everyone realized they were holding steaming piles instead of pipe dreams.

There is no one party to fault here. This was helped along by both sides of the aisle, at the insistence of big banking. Enough green and you can make anything happen in congress. It also helps if your elected congress creature can't tell the the difference between a CD and a CDS.

In any event, the greed fueled money orgy was pushed for by the banks and granted by congress with BOTH parties. The measures were signed by presidents of BOTH parties.

WE, the people, were screwed by just about everyone. At least they bought us a drink ("stimulus" checks).

No, they didn't want to ruin the economy; they just wanted to concentrate greater wealth into the hands of fewer people. They don't see that as the ruination of the economy, since those with wealth continue to live in comfort as long as things don't get quite bad enough for a revolution.

Bush's"tax cuts to the rich" (I got a tax cut. I had no idea that 50k/yr made you rich!)

Depends on where you are and who you're comparing yourself to. But in most places outside the SF Bay Area and NYC, 50k/yr makes you pretty comfortably middle class unless you've got a mess of kids and you've bought more house than you can afford.

But the 3% or so that you saved translates to no more than $1500/year of tax reduction for you. It's something, but not a lot. Now, give that same 3% tax break to someone who's pulling down 100 million dollars per year, and suddenly you've left up to $3M in the pockets of one household. And that's not even considering all the other tax breaks that wealthier people have access to.

And the thing to think about here is the tipping point, the point where, for most Americans, an extra $100 a month is the difference between falling behind and getting ahead. Or the difference between saving for your kid's education or hoping for a scholarship. Or buying those new brake pads or waiting a month or two. $1500 a year in savings for a middle class person might make a more substantive difference in their daily lives than the $3M would for the person brining in $100M per year. Except for the principle of the matter, the richer person wouldn't even notice it.

And that's the core of why people complain about Reagan and Bush's "tax cuts for the wealthy". It's not that they didn't benefit a substantial number of average people in some way--they did. But they provided a windfall for the sector of society that simply did not need it, and with all the lost tax revenue, services for those who are the most in need of them have been repeatedly cut. Public schools, mental health institutions, scientific research, even our national parks have had to scale back services, privatize and focus on profits instead of their core goals, to what has been--I feel--the detriment of society.

I don't think that everything is the fault of any individual executive, but the POTUS does indeed set the agenda; tax cuts were one of Bush's mantra through the whole of his eight years. Combine that with a completely unbalanced budget, two major wars and the continuation of 30 years of removing checks on the banking industry, and the current economic situation was completely predictable.

I think the process of concentration of wealth within a society is not a bad thing overall, but when it gets to a certain point, it becomes difficult for that society to continue to grow and prosper, as there are so many people struggling to get by, surviving at the effective whims of the wealthiest classes. I say treat it like a game: Look! These people won. Now start over and redistribute everything and you get to play again. Think about it. How much fun would a game of Monopoly be if the winner from the last round got to start the next game with all of his or her holdings?

I don't believe in revolutions; they're too bloody. But bloodless redistribution of wealth is possible. It can be done through taxes, or the wealthy can just man up an let go of 90% of their holdings. Rich people don't need money; they'll get rich again. Look at Don Trump: it wasn't that long ago that he was over $100M under water, but that didn't stop him.

So the Bush administration was the one who forced banks to give out loans to people who couldn't pay them back, or was it the Bush administration who's boyfriend was the head of fannie may and the administration blindly defended them stopping a probe many years before the housing crash. Was it the Bush administration that feveroushly fought to stop drilling for oil in the US which would lead to more money staying in the country. I'm not saying that Bush did not make mistakes but to say he was directly res

If it really was a coverup, then they would have been deleted completely.

Not necessarily, because if evidence of that deletion was found, then that in itself would have led to prosecutions. Violating the archiving laws is a serious crime, and letting the special prosecutor get them with an Al Capone gambit would have been foolish. No, much better that the data be "lost", as in present but unavailable for current use. After all, the e-mails would only have to stay missing until the investigation was concluded. Then the emails show up again, and voila -- as far as the official record goes, the Bush administration violated neither intelligence nor data archival laws.

Of course there's a simpler explanation. As TFA states: "Records released as a result of the lawsuits reveal that the Bush White House was aware during the president's first term in office that the e-mail system had serious archiving problems". So odds are that it was simply that their archival system sucked and it really did lose the emails accidentally. Sure one could argue that having a system that accidentally loses emails is convenient if you want to "accidentally" lose some emails without it being obvious, but again according to TFA they did try to get Microsoft's help to fix it before the issue even became public. And evidently failed.

Which is somewhat related to the topic my sibling post pointed out, the always droll "How can Bush be both an evil genius and a complete moron at the same time?" Well the obvious answer is that most people are some combination of smart and stupid at the same time. The Bush Admin being a perfect example. They were collectively extremely smart at getting the nation to think a war of choice was a necessity, yet they were terrible at prosecuting said war. They were great at political manipulations and neutering opponents, yet terrible at leveraging that advantage to achieve results. They were geniuses at filling positions with cronies and yes-men, but morons at hiring people who were actually competent -- including the IT department, apparently.

Anyway, getting back to the topic of these emails and how hiding them for only a short time is sufficient, the National Security Archive who the former White House spokesmen slams as "liberal" and "distorting the facts" demonstrates this clearly. They might be liberal, though they uncover dirt on liberal Presidents like Kennedy, and regardless I don't see how their liberal bias can modify the contents of documents received via FOIA. If you didn't know whether to believe that the U.S. government, and specifically Oliver North, were aware the Contras were smuggling drugs into the U.S. and approved of this [gwu.edu], well, here's the U.S. government telling you in black and white. But it doesn't matter anymore, at least as far as North et. al. are concerned, now does it?

Brilliant analysis. I would also add that you have to factor in Karl Rove retaining his e-mail account and Blackberry on the Republican National Committee server, which was not covered by the Presidential Records Act, for use in his role managing the Republican Party, and then conveniently "forgetting" to switch back to his White House userid when he handled e-mail related to official government business in his government-salaried job. Potentially including the routing of classified information through the non-secure RNC system.

"Not necessarily, because if evidence of that deletion was found, then that in itself would have led to prosecutions."

So, you created a nice straw man hypothetical. The issue of the GPP is that the emails were not deleted, therefore there was no cover up. We don't have evidence (reported) that there was any deletion attempt (or success). That 22mio emails were found suggests something other than a cover up. You are right, _had they deleted emails_ that would have suggested a possible cover up. But, they _ha

Indeed I did posit a hypothetical*, but like I said I think there's a simpler explanation in an unintentionally shitty archiving system.

The issue of the GPP is that the emails were not deleted, therefore there was no cover up. You are right, _had they deleted emails_ that would have suggested a possible cover up. But, they _had not deleted_ emails. Therefore, your point is moot.

Except my actual point is that implication isn't true -- not deleting emails does not mean there was no coverup. They could have also "lost" them, and this would actually be the smart thing to do since evidence of deletion would be evidence of a cover up. That's what I meant by "Al Capone" gambit: when you can't get them for the crime, get them for the cover-up. So, if you're the conspirator, don't let them get you for the cover up by not actually deleting the emails. By the time they're found, released, and read the emails to find anything relevant, the prosecutor and you are both long gone. NSArchive is full of examples of things past their political statute of limitations, released years later.

That their archive system seems to have legitimately sucked makes that sure seem a lot less likely, though. Al Capone had a hard time arguing he didn't have good accountants. If this was actually a conspiracy, then well played, Bush Administration.

But really in however many years before NSArchive has put up their Bush Jr. documentation, I doubt any of this will be the among the most interesting reading.

* But not a straw man, because at no point did I represent this hypothetical as being someone else's argument.:P

If it really was a coverup, then they would have been deleted completely.

and if it really was unintentional, then they would've taken less than "new administration plus year+" to find them.

Maybe it was an accident, and they found them on some unlabeled backup tape. Maybe it was an accident, and this is the first time they thought of using low-level disk tools to undelete. Or maybe it was intentional, and someone doing the grunt work "forgot" to "accidently delete" the backup tapes (in a whistle-blower

I'm waiting for the entire archive to be posted to WikiLeaks. That ought to be fun; and the right wing has acknowledged the legitimacy of posting huge archives of other peoples' private email, as long as you can pull out a few nice quotes that look incriminating, so they won't mind if someone leaks it.

Unless this computer was retired and moved out of the Whitehouse before the emails were deleted.

The emails accumulated over *years*, and then they all disappeared. Well, I am sure they ended up on several, if not dozens of computers. Even if they were deleted on purpose, there may be computer eye-witnesses that weren't "eliminated". Maybe a hope PC that was used for work - connecting to a VPN, downloading your email, but not really understanding there is a local copy. Then you donate your PC to some charity

I love the spin that is being put on this: "found", "technical problems", etc. - esp in the Washington Post. These e-mails just happened to have technical problems and get "lost" when 10 of the senior members of the Bush/Cheney Administration where under investigation concerning a conspiracy to violate foreign intelligence secrecy laws. Just happened to get "lost", yessirree.

sPh

If you talking about the Valerie Plame thing, it turns out that there was no cover up because it wasn't the administration that leaked the name. Remember Dick Armitage [cnn.com]?

However, I will say that the administration didn't want an investigation into that leading to something else. I remember another president was being investigated for something he was cleared of (Whitewater) and ended up getting into trouble from something completely unrelated (Lewinski).

> If you talking about the Valerie Plame thing, it turns out that there was> no cover up because it wasn't the administration that leaked the name.> Remember Dick Armitage

Remember that Patrick Fitzgerald said he could not complete his investigation because of the conspiracy to obstruct justice, and that there was "a cloud over the Office of the Vice-President"? Remember that Novak testified that Armitage leaked the information to him, but that in no way proved that Armitage was the only person wh

Remember that Patrick Fitzgerald said he could not complete his investigation because of the conspiracy to obstruct justice, and that there was "a cloud over the Office of the Vice-President"? Remember that Novak testified that Armitage leaked the information to him, but that in no way proved that Armitage was the only person who leaked information, or even that Armitage was the first to leak? Remember the notes in Libby's handwriting on the typed minutes of his meetings with Cheney?

I am so happy that I don't know the level of raw hatred and paranoia to continue to blame someone for a crime AFTER someone else has confessed (Armitage), that confession has been confirmed (by Novak) and the case has been closed.

I'm not so sure that I can agree with that. It may or may not compete with digg (not having ever visited digg I can't compare the two) but I often see stories pop up on the so-called "mainstream media" (CNN, MSNBC) sites a week or two after they are featured here. I've noticed this with a lot of technology articles but/. also seems to beat them to the punch on various political issues as well, particularly those that focus on our civil liberties and online rights.

If Slashdot's primary function was to simply present a news story without regard to comments, there'd be little need for a moderation system or comments for that matter. The only reason Slashdot got as far as it did was the moderation system that allows fruitful discussion of articles. Without it, Slashdot would be long dead.